![[Home]](/graphics/2020-02_logo.png){kind=logo}
July 20, 2025, July 22, 2025, July 23, 2025, August 5, 2025
Produced by: Halifax Harbour Tours
Guide: DanielMacKay
If you find a mistrake or have a suggestion for an update to the tour, or to this page, please email me!
// UNDER CONSTRUCTION //
We live, love, laugh and work on the unceeded territory of the Mi'kmaq. We are all treaty people.
The Mi'kmaw word for the harbour, Jipugtug / K'jipuktuk, means "Great Harbour" and was anglicized to Chebucto, you'll see the word in a variety of places.
I moved to Halifax about 45 years ago and through a sequence of salacious accidents, got very connected to the gay community here, very quickly.
In the mid-1980s I got involved with, and shortly after took over, publishing the previous version of Wayves Magazine. In 2000, I started dumping local Q info into the Halifax Rainbow Encylopedia; it's now at three quarters of a million words and 2200 pages.
The harbour's first human use was of course by the Mi'kmaq, probably starting 4000 years ago; they were were semi nomadic and spent the summers near the shores and winters inland where big game was abundant and have a really beautiful language - Algonquian family, verb centered. So "red" is not an adjective, it's a verb, "Being red."
And, in most Germanic languages, nouns and pronouns are gendered - they have grammatical masculine and feminine and neuter; in Mi’kmag they are animate or inanimate.
The first europeans here were in the 1500s - fishermen and traders; French settlers ("Acadians" - now my partner) starting in the 1600s; 1700s there were many battles between the Acadians and Mi'kmag and British including boats landing here loaded with typhus and typhoid and between that and the battles, the Mi'kmag population was decimated.
On the tour I’ll be telling you some parts of LGBT history in Halifax - as we can see from the harbour, and a few things that are special to the harbour. And I’ll be encouraging you to help out with our big history project.
We don’t have much Q history documented before about 1972 except for a couple of things I’ll mention later.
But, in 1971, a bunch of people started gathering in each others homes and talking about needing social activities and activism. We don’t really have a grasp of the why of this - maybe because Stonewall had happened. There doesn’t seem to have been a precipitating event.
By June of 1972, there was an organization called the Gay Alliance for Equality. They began producing newsletters called the GAEZETTE.
Jim was shop steward of his union local, and they had a gestetner which for a decade was the core of newsletters and posters for GAE. A lot of Halifax history revolves around Jim – from the brave to the extremely depraved, and I’d very much like to put something coherent together about him. LINK:
Very shortly after, they set up the GayLine which was in existence for 24 years!
LINK: GayLine, GaeGala, JimDeYoung.
The Green Lantern Building - in the 1970s this was really an all gay building and a restaurant on the ground floor. The top floor was a gay bar; next down: bookstore; and below, people renting offices and living in them.
And then in January 1976, we started having dances in the building that had been built in 1888 as The Church Of England Institute.
Rosie Porter has done a really beautiful history of 1588 Barrington - see the link.
We, the community, ran the dances which of course generated quite substantial funds which then allowed us to rent the space full time. This was unusual; most gay bars bars in Canada were run by private businesses, often straight-owned ones. This was our space and when you bought a drink, that money went to pay members of the community - and to run community events. Because of its iconic location and look and because it was owned by us, people really connected to it. During non bar hours it was used for meeting spaces, organizing activism events, and there were conferences, concerts and plays mounted in it. And a movie set there.
In 1982 the landlord was reallocating the space and we moved one block towards the harbour - right here, Granville Stret, and renamed the bar Rumours. The long list for the renaming contest is comical - I’ll put a link to it.
Rumours on Granville Street was just being built when I was coming out - 1982, so I helped build it - some of the rough carpentry and electrical and plumbing.
LINK: GreenLantern, 1588 Barrington, The Turret, Here are the suggested names for when we move the bar from Granville to Gottingen -- we ended up keeping "Rumours."
Not to be confused with the current bar called Rumours HFX - they have absolutely nothing else in common; we owned the first Rumours; the current one is owned by a guy. I’ll include a link to the interview with him.
Links: Interview with Rumours HFX owner in March 2024 and one year later.
A million new Canadians first stepped onto Canadian soil here at Pier 11, my mom among them. She had met and fallen in love with one of the Canadian soldiers who liberated her city, Antwerp, after four years of Nazi occupation. It’s quite an interesting museum and if you’re doing research on a Canadian immigrant they’re very helpful.
LINK: Here's a pic of mom.
Just up the street here is the Universalist Unitarian Church, which in October, 1972 when other churches barely considered us human, offered a free meeting space.
South on Barrington Street, you can stay in the same room in a hotel where Oscar Wilde stayed in 1882. There's a very detailled writeup about his visit here and the builiding he performed in, in the links.
The Q community has done several tributes to Wilde; see his page.
Links: UniversalistUnitarianChurch, OscarWilde
If we kept following this edge of the harbour about 50km around the Chebucto peninsula, or 25km southwest as the crow flies, we’d get to Prospect where on April 1, 1873, the worst marine disaster before the Titanic occurred: the grounding of the SS Atlantic with almost 1000 people on board. 535 perished,, and autopsies were done on all of them. One of the sailors, named Bill was discovered… to be biologically female.
Five years ago a local lesbian artist volunteering at the museum found a newspaper article from then and was inspired to create a beautiful and very moving graphic novel. You’ll notice I’m in the credits. The author and artist was careful to not label Bill as trans - we have no idea how they identified and the word didn’t exist at the time.
Link: CallMeBill
The men's BDSM group, Tightrope, had an annual summer weekend out on McNabs? Island. You can get there by water taxi from Purcell’s cove or the Shearwater Yacht Club. For a number of reasons, the men’s BDSM group shrank and disappeared; I was talking with an organizer since the 1970s last week and he was excited about eight people having gotten together to form a new club.
Way out there, the Titanic sank. Haligonian George Wright sank with it; we wonder if he was gay.
Link: TightRope, GeorgeWright, OscarWilde
Reflections: 1996
Hells Angels: starting in 1997
Link: ReflectionsHellsAngels -- there are several books about it there.
Very cool show in 2011, about gay men on ships; started out in Liverpool, about gay crewmembers on passenger cruises, and was added to with a huge amount of local research. Included a display about the special gay language, Polari.
Halifax had a very very very old trans woman, Patricia Martinson. She’d been a sailor in the British Navy in her youth and had lots of stories to tell of that. For a long time - decades perhaps she volunteered for the Tattoo, the big military entertainment show earlier this month. Then when she was… ninety I think? They told her she was too old for that and she was very unhappy - and was hired by the Maritime Museum as a storyteller and guide. She passed last year at the age of 99.
I talked to the curator of the Maritime Museum and asked about any salty stories he had, and he mentioned a ballad collected by Helen Creighton – who lived over there – called “Conan’s Wharf” about a sailor going to a brothel and being robbed of both his money and clothes. But the prostitute leaves behind some women’s clothing so he has to go back to the ship in drag.
Just past Maritime Museum : Gay bath, "The Apollo" from 1974 to 2005. Before that it was a straight mens’ and womens’ sauna; before that , it was the YMCA, built in 1911.
LINK: HelloSailor, PatriciaMartinson, ApolloBath
So, up here: sailors were arrested and tried for “sodomical practices.” TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THREE YEARS AGO. This is on the to-research-and-write-about list. If anyone’s keen, contact me.
AIDS Educator JJ Lyon: We at the AidsCoalition needed to reach men who had sex with men, and so many of those are not connected in any way with the community. "So I wanted to make a TV ad, of driving around The Hill, because that's all that most of the MSMs in Halifax were familiar with," said JJ.
Links: JJLyon, CitadelHill
There was a 19th century saying, “Ashore, it's wine, women and song, aboard it's rum, bum and concertina'. Which Winston Churchill refined when accused of interfering with naval traditions: “And what are those? Rum, buggery, and the lash.”
I have heard stories about, but not seen, pamphlets that were handed out to visiting sailors, which warned them of where to not go in Halifax – where for instance, if you went you would be likely to be propositioned by a homosexual. I’ve checked with historians at the Maritime Museum here and they say it’s plausible - but they haven’t seen one either.
But that’s the nature of ephemera. Robin Metcalfe recognized that a half century ago and began actively collecting ephemera and now has an archive of it.
There’s been a bit written about homosexuality in the navy - that for most of history it was very much tolerated and perhaps that’s why sailors still have such a caché in the gay community. I’ll put some reading material in the notes page.
On the other hand, starting in the 1950s, we had “The Purge.” - a mortifying few decades in Canadian history. Following on Mccarthyism in the USA, Canada began to persecute queer folk in the military. Soldiers and sailors – and the air force too - were asked to rat on each other - really a witch hunt. The logic was if you were queer you were a security risk. You were a security risk because you could be extorted by enemy forces. You could be extorted because you could lose your job if anyone found out you were gay. You’d lose your job because… you were a security risk. Does anything sound a little circular about that?
Link: ThePurge
Really a gay village scaled just right for Halifax in the 1990s - a bath and several bars; the center of which was the one owned by our community, called Rumours. We also had a gay coffee shop and occult bookstore!
Including the women's bar, The Company House
The current and historic bars there (and everywhere in Halifax) are on the page "Gay Bars."
LINKS: Rumours, InsightCafe, TheCompanyHouse, GayBars, ShirtlessnessDebate
Now for people who think that Halifax is a big city: we play a game that I call “Zero Degrees”. Everything’s connected, everyone’s connected. So hang on this is going to be complicated.
We have many many gay-friendly churches in Halifax, and one all-gay one. The all gay one is… wait for it… wait… BAPTIST. They hired a Southern Baptist lesbian minister named Arla in 2021. Arla’s wife Julie is… wait for it… a distiller! If you see liquor from the distillery JD Shore, that’s lesbian … lick.. ‘Er. Moving on. A year and a half ago, an ex army guy and his partner moved to Halifax and decided to open a gay bar. They decided to re-use the name of the bar the community had, which closed in THIRTY YEARS BEFORE but was still much beloved.They called the bar Rumours. And where did they locate? Right here - (point) behind the Maritime Museum, in the building that JD Shore was using as their distillery (at the time.) So the lesbians were the landlords to the gay bar!
This is the reason I love Halifax. You could feel it as claustrophobic - but I feel it as a big net - a fishing net perhaps, that I am part of, and supported by. Thank you.
Under Construction
Books I had with me:
Other References:
From: Doctor Bob
Dan, you’re asking for saucy tails from the Oceanside. I’m not sure if you even use this, but I’ll throw it out your way anyway. Halifax, being in Port city has had its fair share of colourful people in the past. I was lucky enough to have a practice at Included a good number of those interesting people. One of them was a lady called Ada Mc Callum; she was Halifax notorious madame for over 50 years.
She was allowed to exist partially because she knew too much about too many of the important people in town as they wouldn’t come after her and also she ran a very meticulously clean business. she was a very nice woman, but also had a commanding sense of how to maneuver around the other side. The cops knew she existed. They realized that Halifax was a navy port town, and there was no way of avoiding that chapter’s existence, so there were some tacit understandings. The week before every provincial election she was “rated“ and this little old lady who was that 70 years old, would appear on lake local news being scored by the police to spend the night in jail, to prove that the current regime was during its due diligence. Another facet that allowed this business to continue was the fact that her women were checked every week with cultures and we’re not allowed to work if there was any problem.
Having patients who were friends with Ada, she soon became a patient and soon I became that doctor that was seeing the women every week for cultures. Ada wanted to make sure that the province wasn’t being billed for the doctor visits so the women were seen on a cash only basis. they came every week and if I said they couldn’t work, they didn’t work. They were for the most part really nice women.
I certainly learned more from from this chapter then I ever learned for any Eagle Scout merit badge. We became friends and I still communicate. This is a very well oiled system. The madams across the country had agreement. The women would spend six weeks here and then they would move on to other places such as Toronto Montreal, St. John St. John’s here, etc. so there were always new faces, as it were.
One week the women came and they were all sore and irritated “down there”. When I asked about it, they just said “the Japs are in town”. With my limited knowledge of porn stars going thru my mind I didn’t think of John Holmes or Jeff Stryker as being Japanese, so I settled for displaying my naivete to ask for clarification.
I was soon to learn that in Japanese fish villages instead of circumcising their sons, when they reach puberty they would implant pearls and or other jewels, depending on the wealth of the family into the foreskin and along the shaft of the penis—pearls being the most common as pearl fishing was a big industry there.
This presented as a professional hazard for these working women. Needless to say this piqued (peeked) the curiosity of this white Ivy League doctor.
As luck would have it. I was also support doctor too many of the shipping agencies in town so that when the Japanese fishing boat came to town and crew needed a doctor, they were brought to me.
Immediately after learning this cultural titbit the first Japanese fisherman that came to my office had an earache. Being the thorough physician I am and this was a new patient, this earache obviously required a full physical, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but... rings of pearls.
